Money On The Move

State Report Ties Suburban Sprawl To Affluence, Not Roads

After 19 months of study, a state report is expected to yield a not-too-surprising reason for suburban sprawl: money.

The Illinois State Toll Highway Authority ordered the report to see if new tollway and freeway extensions into semirural areas cause suburban sprawl.

Environmental groups against proposed toll-road extensions of Interstate Highway 355 into Will County, and Illinois Highway 53 into Lake County blame such highway improvements for uncontrolled housing development.

But a $133,000 report by the University of Illinois at Chicago's Urban Transportation Center authority reaches a different--if obvious--conclusion, according to those who've had an early look.

"Its principal conclusion is that the primary cause of suburban sprawl is affluence," said Donald O'Toole, spokesman for the toll authority.

That is, sprawl may be more readily explained by the truism that land is consumed, ever further out from the region's urban center, because there is an ample supply of those who can afford to do so.

"If there is anything they spent time on and worked hard at, it was on the relationship between growing income and land consumption," said Phillip Peters, director of the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission (NIPC).

The study was completed last June. But its final release had been delayed while it was reviewed by other agencies, mainly NIPC, but also the Chicago Area Transportation Study (CATS), the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) and the tollway itself.

A federal judge halted work on the I-355 extension because tollway officials failed to adequately explore alternatives to it, and to assess its environmental impact on the surrounding areas. The contention that building new tollroads causes sprawl was at the center of the January 1997 ruling.

But the study that tollway officials commissioned was charged with more, such as exploring whether new highways prompt people to move out of urban areas, and the effects they have on relocation of economic development, businesses and industries.

"I think the conclusion is that there are many factors that contribute to the out-migration of people (from cities and inner ring suburbs) and that the building of major (transportation) facilities was only one," said Eugene Ryan, associate executive director of CATS.

NIPC reviewed the study twice. A sticking point was a feeling that the UIC analysts were looking too narrowly at the phrase, "decentralization," or flight from urban areas and inner-ring suburbs, out to thinly populated rural areas, while not examining other factors, such as lack of availability of funds and other barriers to redevelop older communities, and taxation systems that reward new and younger communities for new development.

"Redevelopment (of older areas) is the opposite side of sprawl. If you redevelop, it would reduce the pressure on farm land," Peters said.

NIPC's concerns have been resolved, and the study's conclusions, which will be presented Monday, "we largely agree with," said O'Toole.

Some academics, urban planners and development officials see other factors--a new retail center, an airport, or population growth--as the more critical factors driving sprawl.